marketing strategies for the mobile startup ceo

maRkeTING STRaTeGIeS

STaRTUp CeOfOr THE MOBIlE

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MARKETING STRATEGIESFOR THE MOBILESTARTUP CEO

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INTRODUCTION

SUNIl ThOmaSCEO fOr ClEvErTap

APPS IN STORE(in millions)

as a startup CEO, you’ve already worn many hats in developing your venture. at these critical early stages of your company, hopefully you’re doing these three things:

Now add to your CEO (Chief Everything Officer) role managing marketing activities. If you can hire a Head of Marketing this will increase your knowledge and skill base as a team, but it is still imperative that as a CEO you have a strong grasp on how to develop and execute a solid go-to-market plan.

This eBook will spell out strategies for a (likely budget-conscious) CEO that wants to build on her existing marketing skillset. You’ll be given an outline of tools and strategies to act as your company’s marketing lead or better manage your marketing hires. You have good reason to be concerned with your mobile app marketing, because as of July 2015, there are 1.6 mln apps in the Google Play store, and 1.5 mln in the Apple app store. Here are some ways to get ahead of the pack.

But first…

CleverTap’s platform data shows that new mobile apps risk losing 90% of their newly acquired users if they’re not engaging with them in the first week. My recommendation to a new startup CEO is to address retention issues FIRST before spending significant time and money on acquiring new users. I have found this guarantees a much higher ROI, and will increase app loyalty and engagement.

Google Play Apple Store

1.5m1.6m

Creating a product that solves a real customer need

Providing your customers with a strong emotional experience with your product or

service

Recruiting the best team possible

1. 2. 3.

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Your goal right now is to get your product in front of as many people as possible. Creating content and sharing it to outlets where your target audience lives is one of the strongest ways to acquire customers, confirmed as 86% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers use content marketing techniques. Here’s a quick outline to create a content marketing funnel:

Develop a keyword strategy. Go to Google adWords Keyword planner, put in a target keyword (say ‘dating’ if you have a dating app), and then click on the ‘keyword ideas’ tab. Select one of these keywords, and put this into the search box and click ‘get ideas.’ The results – the long tail keywords – will show you directly what your customers have searched for.

Develop unique, high-quality content integrating those keywords. Depending on your product and industry, this could be a how-to video, an infographic, an entertaining vine video & social media post, or guest blog post.

Get your content in front of your audience (see the following marketing strategies on how to do that). Build marketing roadmaps around your content launches & execution strategies. By creating roadmaps vs. campaigns, you’ll be more apt to be flexible in your marketing messages, positioning, and channels instead of creating traditional one-off campaigns.

CONTeNT FUNNel

A

B

C

Content Marketing Institute, 2014Tomoson, Influencer Marketing Study 2015.



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INFlUeNCeRS aRe YOUR FRIeNDSafter you have defined your keyword strategy, identified your target audience(s) and where they spend their time online, and created some interesting content, it is time to start putting together your target blo-gger & influencer list. Influencer marketing is now the fastest growing online customer acquisition tactic, ahead of organic search, paid search, and email marketing.

The first step in building your influencer program is to determine what types of relevant people will likely positively impact your business by spreading the word. These could be industry experts, social me-dia celebs, and super fans. Community leaders, local journalists and bloggers, and niche celebrities can have a bigger impact on outreach with your product than a large scale influencer with a less engaged, niche community.

after you’ve identified the types of people you’d like to reach out to, the next step is to employ a streamlined approach with the use of tools to quickly, and at scale, identify your target influencers. It’s easy to get bogged down by the tedious tasks in influencer outreach and mana-gement, so utilizing tools to speed up the process and make it more effective is critical for time-strapped teams. There are some free and low-cost tools such as BuzzSumo, Topsy, and Crawlytics that identify key influencers by keyword and industry.

It is important to note that the key metric to look at when choosing an influencer is an influencer’s engagement rate, which is how often and how many followers engage with their posts vs. their overall reach/number of followers. While it may be tempting to want to onboard influencers with very large reach, they are often more expensive, diffi-cult to reach, and their marketing efforts can be less effective as their followers are less engaged than more tight-knit, niche communities.



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according to a recent report from Mailchimp, email marketing open rates range around 20-25% depending on your industry. The ‘mobile’ category of the report found that open rates for mobile app-catego-rized companies averaged 21%, with a 2.5% unique click rate. This is a rate that is difficult to replicate with unpaid, or even paid marketing activities. Certain target audiences such as business professionals and early tech adopters use email more often; so keep in mind your audien-ce and how often they’re likely checking email when developing your email program.

emaIl IS NOT DeaD

Mailchimp, August 2015



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TIpS TO DRIve emaIlSUbSCRIbeRS

Devise an email marketing strategy as one of your first marketing tasks.

Whether your audience heard about your company via social media, digital ads, a blog, or pr announcement, place a call-to-action on your landing page or company website to drive email subscribers, optimizing for best email conversion.add copy in this dedicated email that explains the benefits of allowing push notifications.

for users that have downloaded your app but haven’t subscribed to email yet, encourage this to happen with an in-app email subscribe button, and send push notifications with new email content announcements.

When planning your onboarding strategy, your first email should be dedicated to encouraging users to download your app and focus on the benefits your app offers. add a copy in this dedicated email that explains the benefits of allowing push notifications. a recent report showed that push notifications more than doubled a mobile app user’s average 30, 60 and 90-day retention rates, so

driving users via email to opt-in is an important strategy.

In your following emails, create a win-back email for users that have clicked to download the app but didn’t fully complete that action, or have downloaded but are inactive within a certain period. again include copy that states the benefits the user will receive from the app.

as of March 2015, 45% of email opens occurred on mobile, 36% on desktop and 19% via a webmail provider. Optimize your email for mobile!



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Startup CEO’s often wonder when is the best time to begin a pr program. Before you begin pr outreach, ask yourself the following questions:

pR & COmmUNICaTe WISelY

JeRemIah OWYaNGparTNEr aND INDUSTrY

aNalYST aT alTIMETEr GrOUp

“Build your network before you need them.”

Have you clearly defined your app’s value proposi-tion, and how your company is different from your competitors? If you’re not solid on this, wait until you are.

How “ready” for the public is your app? If you are still experiencing bugs, or you haven’t quite hit the value propositions you’re aiming for, think about ha-ving a limited release until you’re ready. Journalists receive a ton of app pitches, and first impressions here count.

Kahuna, 2015.Adestra ‘Top 10 email clients’ – March 2015



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heRe IS STaRTUp pR TO DO lIST:

If you’re not quite ready for a full pr announcement, create a beta preview of your app using Testfli-ght. Share this with journalists a few weeks before launch. also, make sure your app has been appro-ved by the app store before your media launch.

If you want to release your app quietly, and then go for a bigger splash when your app and value props are polished, tap into your local press who are more forgiving but will be a good warm up to the big league press. Make sure you have your first press announcement within six months of your app’s release so you don’t become outdated news.

Create a press kit (read how to here).

When determining which media outlets and journa-lists to reach out to, research journalists that have written about companies and themes similar to yours. If your app’s story is relevant for a seaso-nal-type story – like a dating app launch around valentine’s Day – highlight this for the journalist.

Keep your email pitches straightforward and to-the-point. Track your outreach on a spreadsheet and follow up with new or additional updates if you don’t hear back from the journalist right away.

PR



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RemembeR TO OpTImIze

as soon as your app is live, email your contacts and ask them for a positive review. In this email outreach, make sure you include your app’s name, price, value propositions, the app store link, your press kit and supportive materials such as a video.

When you are pushing an app update, don’t just say ‘bug fixes.’ Include interesting copy on what you are updating and how it will benefit the user.

Your app description is important as this is what potential users will read when they visit the app Store. Only the first two to three lines are displayed in the main app description page, therefore include your most important information in those lines.

Every app is allotted 100 characters in the keyword section of the store. Brainstorm the words associated with your app, remove duplicated words, and search the app store to see what your competition has posted.



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MarTech is the technology tools that exist to support marketing efforts. We will try not to overwhelm you with the abundance of marketing tools that exist but instead focus on those that are most relevant (and cost-effective) for the mobile marketer and CEO. Here’s a few of our favorites:

mORe maRTeCh

DavID vICTORHEaD Of prODUCT aT

vET ON DEMaND

“The most important task is to get your product to market. While it is important to have analytics, email capture, and simple user engagement tools set up at launch, often the Type A CEO spends too much time researching and demo’ing every MarTech tool that exists to support marketing efforts.”

This tools allows you to connect the advertising, analytics, marketing and user testing tools that you are using into one single data hub.

This is a great tool for creating facebook ads. Upload your pictures, taglines and audience targets and adspresso will mix and match every combination. It will run the ads and optimize to the highest performing.

This easy-to-use email marketing tool is often the startup CEO’s favorite email program. It is intuitive, has a pleasing user interface, and great customer service.



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Pay-Per-Install Networks - Smaller ppI networks allow you to run tests for as little as $100. Sign up with your preferred ppI network, and choo-se the ‘cost per install’ campaign type. The network will then target users with messages to download your app.

App Cross-Promotion Networks – app exchanges Tap for Tap and Tap-tica offer app cross-promotion. Two apps agree to exclusively display each other’s ads on their apps, and they earn credits after they genera-te an app download. These credits can then be spent on additional ads. If you don’t support ads on your app, you can also purchase credits for installs.

App Directory Listings – app seekers search directories such as appo-licious and appBrain when looking for new and popular apps. Consu-mers install apps and provide instant feedback. The costs to use these tools are based on the number of installs generated from the site.

MEASURED SUCCESS.at the time of your product launch, and ideally as you were developing your product, you should define your marketing goals and what you would like to achieve. This could be 100k customers in one year, 50k app downloads in 6 months, or a target percentage of retained and en-gaged users 90 days after downloading. after you have defined these goals, make them known to the entire company, and report these daily, weekly and monthly. as the CEO, explore metrics that cover your entire business, including sales, marketing, UX, customer support and more.

paID (bUT COST-eFFeCTIve)aDveRTISING

STaRTUppRINCeSS.COm

“Marketing is like laundry, the job is never done”



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author - Kara Dake


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